Festival City and (No) Kangaroo Island

The civil engineers who designed the road between Horsham and Adelaide must have known that the scenery, flat and almost empty for miles on end, might render drivers catatonic. Interspersed with the place names (Dimboola, Gerung Gerung, Kiata, Nhill, Tintinara, Culburra, Coonalpyn, Coomandook) and signs alerting you to “mountains” you might otherwise miss, including Mt. Zero,  elevation 340 meters, were billboards with dire warnings: Fatigue is Fatal, Survive This Drive, Take a Break, and my favorite, the alliterative Drowsy Drivers Die. Despite the long flight and time difference, Bill was kept alert by the challenge of trying to remember to stay on the correct side of the road (and by panicked reminders by Ailie and me) as we made our way to Adelaide.

Adelaide was supposed to be a stopover on the trip, a place to rest after the drive and to collect Cyril from the airport the next day. It turned out to be the highlight of my stay in Oz this time around. 

The city was alive with concurrent festivals, and in our short stay we lucked into a free concert on the river to ring in the Fringe Festival, the opening day of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and a talk by one of my favorite authors at the inaugural day of the 2014 Adelaide Writer’s Festival. If we’d been so inclined we could also have joined the thousands of people heading toward the Clipsal V8 races in the east end of Adelaide – but we didn’t need to, since we could hear the strange buzzing sound of the racecars, like an armada of megamozzies, from across the city.

After a few last minute purchases (dark chocolate passion-fruit cremes from Haigh’s for me, some flash new boots for Ailie, shorts and a t-shirt for Bill, who had forgotten that he was coming to southern hemispheric summer when he packed) we headed south to Cape Jervis to catch the Kangaroo Island ferry. The KI to-do list was short: relax, do some beach hopping and see and photograph enough wallabies and kangaroos to be able compare and tell the difference between them. Two out of three’s not bad.

Our house in the trees was comfortable and laid-back. The beaches were many, varied, and luxuriously empty.

 But the wildlife (except for the unfortunate roadkill roos and possums grotesquely lying feet up on the verges) never emerged from the bush in our presence -- I guess, like any island local toward the end of tourist season, they were sooooo over us. And so it passed that the kangaroos I photographed on Kangaroo island where those pressed into bricks or fashioned into mosaics near the ferry terminal. Or were they wallabies?

We did see what seemed like a small city of NZ fur seals in Flinders Chase National Park, and Bill claimed the wildlife-spotting prize for pointing out the koalas hanging out in the gum trees behind the visitor’s center. I expressed a little skepticism as I wondered how recently Disney had installed these particularly lifelike Koalanimatrons, and wondered how hard it could have been to include some wallabybots while they were at it.

Big Things in a Big Country

New Zealand has its giant kiwi fruit in Te Puke, it's humungous carrot in Ohakune, its scarily large trout in Gore. 

So why was I surprised to see Australian megafauna gracing a roadside attraction on the way to Horsham from Halls Gap? I'm still regretting my split-second decision to speed by this house-sized koala. What was I thinking?

As we continued northwest to Adelaide after visiting a friend in Horsham, we slowed to enter the town of Keith, where I spied a sign listing  "Land Rover On Pole" as one of the town's attractions.  Another colloquialism? I wondered. Maybe they're warning us that we're heading into a really rough road, with 4 wheel drive advised, I thought. But no. These Ozzies say what they mean and mean what they say, for indeed in the town park there was a Land Rover and yup, it was, as advertised, on a pole. We fought the all but overwhelming urge to stop and investigate the need to put an SUV on a stick and drove on.

But when I got back to NZ and did some research, it turns out that a less direct route to our destination could have taken us by an oversized statue of a plate of potatoes and forks, ready to be served to a carb-loading giant. This one is for my Spud Buds back home. A little butter, a little salt, and I could imagine a very happy giant.  Road trip? 

I know I'm In Oz When....

I know I'm teaching in Halls Gap, Australia when: 

I sip my morning coffee on my cabin veranda and watch the kangaroos hopping to gather for their al fresco breakfast

.

I look out of my classroom and notice this Victoria license plate.

 

I put a kookaburra in charge of supervising safety procedures at the cutting mat.

 

I add new expressions to my growing antipodean list of idioms. "A blind man would be glad to see it," one student declared while reassuring another her craftsmanship was good enough. "A ball of muscle," another student replied when I asked her how her evening had been. Turns out that's the Ozzie equivalent of "Box o' birds, mate," which I learned from some Kiwi friends years ago and am still lobbying to add to the American lexicon.

I borrow a bike, gratis, from the local backpacker's accommodation by leaving the owner with no more information than my first name.

I share breakfast with tutors from Ireland, England, New York, and Florida as well as far flung Australian states like Western Australia and Tasmania -- and from the wonderfully named town of Bundadoon. And breakfast is always muesli and fruit. Unless I want Vegemite and toast.

I watch students and teachers playing petanque while the roos watch from the neighboring cricket pitch.

I answer, "She'll be right, mate," when a friend worries about how we'll get to class without access to a car. And I believe it. And it's true.

Food Choice/Choice Food

The first time we came to New Zealand the standard choices for nibbles in cafes included Anzac biscuits and canned asparagus rolled into sliced of buttered white bread. I remember writing home and saying that I loved New Zealand but needed to come home because I was hankering after a decent cup of coffee.

Cafe food has come a long way from those days of tasteless cookies and cuisine designed for people who believe mushy peas are a treat. These days I return to NZ not just to see my friends but because I have a yen for a decaf trim flat white, which is like a latte but better, for savoury muffins and scones filled with feta and pumpkin and bacon, to sample dragonfruit (hot pink inside and out) for cheap mangoes and passionfruit available by the kilo.

 

But discovering Little and Friday's, a cafe attached to a fabric store in a backstreet of Auckland's Newmarket, gave me fresh reasons to return. It was hard to choose just one shot of the amazing sugary treats on offer. Yes, you can also get salads and sandwiches, but really, why would you?

Four Reasons To Love New Zealand

I can stroll on the beach at Pauanui, on the east coast about 2 hours from Auckland

or take the half hour ferry ride from downtown Auckland to Waiheke Island and enjoy the section of Palm Beach for the fully clothed (the clothing optional area is discreetly screened by walls of rock)

or head south on Waiheke to Rocky Bay

or have a picnic breakfast on the beach in St. Heliers, an Auckland suburb. 

 

My list of things necessary to include in the architecture of bliss include the sound of water lapping, the aerial ballet of clouds, and the possibility of a water view around every curve. New Zealand ticks all those boxes on my list. Autumn has started here and yet still the golden weather shines on. Today I head south, which means it's time to pack my woolie socks and leave my short sleeves behind; in this hemisphere heading south means chilly weather and crisp days.

hot cross carbs

There are several things about being in New Zealand at Easter time that interest me, quite apart from the dizzying sensation of celebrating a holiday of rebirth in autumn when the light is leaving and leaves are falling.  Take, for example, the cult of the hot cross bun, which used to be available  for a short time each year close to the Easter holidays. People would greet their appearance with the same inexplicable delight they display for Christmas fruitcake. 

As the Kiwis have become more American in their capitalism, with shops staying open in the evenings and on the weekends  they've also learned how to market the heck out of their holiday specialties. Just like in America, where candy companies start to sell us Halloween candy in September, you can now get hot cross buns weeks before Easter here. Unlike in the US, where we fool ourselves into believing that we will store that bag o' Snickers in the pantry for a month and half until the little monsters come calling, you really can't tell yourself  that the hot cross buns you buy at the beginning of March are going to be greeting the Easter Bunny on the holiday table.

Another Easter tradition here is the closure of schools, government services, and many businesses on Good Friday. When NZ was a British colony and mostly C of E, Good Friday being a national holiday made sense in a religious way. But NZ stopped being a homogenous land of immigrants from the UK years ago, and is now home to large numbers of residents who came not from England or Scotland or Ireland, not from Europe even, but from Africa and Asia and the wide Polynesian seas. The growing diversity of its population hasn't affected the nation's tradition of closing down shop on Good Friday. And those closures are repeated on something called Easter Monday, whose religious significance none of my friends here could explain. Schools put the cross on the bun, so to speak, by extending the closure through Tuesday, because, really, one might as well. 

If having the day off thanks to someone else's religion wasn't a good enough reason to look forward to Good Friday, I could learn to love celebrating the day if I could get invited to my friend Louise's every year, where her  scones topped with jam and whipped cream appear on the table next to a tower of her daughter's hot cross buns. Carbohydrates, fat, and sugar. Now that's the way to celebrate a holiday, even if no one can really explain why. 

And just when I was recovering from my second helping of whipped cream and scones, it was time to set another table for Easter at my friend Yoke's. So if you're wondering how you improve on scones and cream (and hot cross buns, if that's your passion)...just add cheese, salami, ham, and chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate, as if the Easter Bunny suddenly decided he was done with this house-to-house delivery nonsense,  dropped his whole chocolate inventory into Yoke's kitchen, and hopped away to rest up for whatever the heck happens on Easter Monday.  Perhaps the purpose of Easter Monday is to flagellate ourselves with carrot sticks to atone for our festive dining sins. 

Seasons, Shortages, and Aisle Seats

In New Zealand, we turned the clocks back this weekend -- it seems like a sort of April Fool’s joke that seasons officially change here on the first days of months rather than according to the earth’s tilt relation to the sun. The observable effect is the same: the days are shortening and the air is no longer filled with the scent of bloom and growth.  My short-sleeved tops were thrown back in the suitcase a few weeks ago, and the weather is becoming, as they charmingly say here, unsettled. The wind and rain that flooded Fiji last week is heading to New Zealand, and let’s face it, I can have wind and rain at home, where I can also hug Bill, pet my cats, and camp out in my studio.

So I’m heading to the airport today. Call me crazy (or, more precisely, a tad homesick) but I’m looking forward to sitting in my cattle class aisle seat and scrolling through the choice of movies that will divert me before the Ambien and the magic of chemistry allows me to wake in San Francisco. Whenever I’m faced with a long flight I think about how The Future we were promised as little baby boomettes never eventuated. How I’d like to say “Beam me up,” and arrive home in minutes, where an army of automated devices would free me for more leisure time to ride my jet pack. The future we got, the one with Skype and GPS and books being read to me on a device no larger than a pat of butter, is equally fantastic, of course, but there are moments when I still pine for my robot maid and paperless society (except for the paper of books, which I’m not yet ready to give up).

Back in the present here in the land that’s like home but not quite like home, what Kiwis are learning to live without for the foreseeable future is Marmite. Yes, almost as scary a prospect as the incoming blow from Fiji is the run on the salty, smelly, slightly sweet spread that Kiwis prefer on their morning toast.  The production glitch is yet another aftershock of Christchurch’s earthquakes, and it was reported as if the switch to Vegemite, which is produced in Australia, might result in a national identity crisis. So some things are indeed just like home, including the media which can manufacture high drama over the shortage of brown sludge. No Kiwi I talked to seems to be concerned with the empty spot on the grocery shelf where Marmite used to be, but the papers do seem concerned about that potential hole on page 2.

My bags are packed and I’m happy to head home, in small part because I have next year’s return to the Southern Hemisphere on my calendar and passion fruit preserves in my bag. But don’t blame me for the dearth of Marmite in NZ, because I promise you, there just wasn’t room for any of it in my suitcase.